William J. Hadlow (40992901182)

Dr. William Hadlow (1921-2015) was recruited to work at the National Institutes of Health Rocky Mountain Laboratory in 1952. He started as its veterinary pathologist and remained at RML in Hamilton, Montana, in that capacity until retiring on May 30, 1987. He started a scrapie disease research program unlike any other, looking at the distribution of the disease, the organs it affected and sites where the disease replicated. His was the first group at NIH to study these so-called “slow virus” infections. Hadlow made significant contributions to the field that is now referred to as prion diseases. In addition to making seminal comparisons between scrapie and the human disease kuru, he played a crucial role in identifying chronic wasting disease and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease) as prion diseases. In the 1970s, Hadlow assisted future Nobel Prize-winner Dr. Stanley Prusiner with characterizing the enigmatic prion protein at RML.